An appeal for sanctuary and sanity

So what have we been up to? I like to think of us as tolerant people. We enjoy our friends, love playing with their children, and we even look forward to the noise of children during sacrament meeting on Sundays (seriously, I personally always felt like something was missing in my student wards when it was ominously silent in sacrament meeting). We had Stake Conference today, and I know there were some inspirational messages and talks, and I came away feeling uplifted, but for the life of me all I can remember from those two precious hours of spiritual enlightenment is the obnoxious children that sat behind us and the even more obnoxious parents who apparently felt that their conversations were as important as the speakers because they used the same volume in their voices when they called after their kids, told their kids to be quiet, and told their kids to go with Daddy. But I do have to sympathize, the poor mother's ability to judge decibals and sheer willpower to fight her kids must have been damaged and exhausted because toward the end of the meeting one child started screaming, and she just held it, pretending that if she acted like she couldn't hear it then everyone else would too. Friends, I have no idea what this mother and father go through on a daily basis or what kind of psychological disrepair has been done by a daily dose of screaming children, but I wish I could ask the parents "what did you learn from the speakers?" I'm sorry, but solely based on what I got from them, I can predict the dire nature of their response. Did these people honestly think that they were going to get something from it going into it? Would you take such well-behaved children to the temple (if you could) or an opera or even to your office? If your answers to these questions are no, then why would you bring them in tow to a meeting where a servent of the Lord had received revelation pertinent to our eternal salvation and was trying to impart it to us. I know I must sound harsh, inexperienced, calloused, rude, or otherwise, but as I looked to the little girl sitting next to me and the little boy sitting in front of me who were the same age, but for some mysterious reason were sitting reverently, and appeared to actually be taking mental note of what the speakers were saying, I realized that I am not unreasonable. I will have to find them and have them summarize the meeting for me.